on Drugs: Excuse Me While I Kiss the Sky

In 2012, I ventured into the Amazon to experience ayahuasca, a spiritual medicine and hallucinogenic brew. This was not my mission; while traveling through Bolivia, my friend and I stumbled upon a sign promising “shamanic dream experiences” and figured we’d give it a try. Here is my experience tripping absolute-fucking-balls…

Gnawing on a handful of coca leaves, I’m trying to catch my breath in the thickness of the Bolivian rain forest. Our guide to the campsite halts once again to allow us to catch up. We’ve been instructed not to eat or drink (besides water) for 24 hours and it shows. Much of the day has been dedicated to travel on foot, motorbike, and ferries. This quickly begins to feel like the type of lark that will certainly lead to personal injury or death, though I am convinced that this experience will ultimately be something I hold dear with me for the rest of my life, so I am trying my best to not vomit or black out — as this will make for a better memory.

A brief synopsis of how I got here: I am in Bolivia to celebrate my friends’ wedding and, after the ceremony, decide to leave my plans open-ended and explore the country. After a brief, awkward conversation with my boss, I ventured into the depths of Bolivia with my friend Mark. Ayahuasca was not even on our radar―we just wanted keep enjoying the Southern Hemisphere weather in January. We bounced around Bolivia for a couple of weeks, flying from Cochabamba to Santa Cruz to La Paz, ultimately settling in Rurrenabaque, a small town known as the gateway to the rainforest. Flights to Rurre are so rare that we had to find travel through TAM, an airline owned by Bolivia’s Air Force.

Back to the story: We manage to catch up with our guide, who insists we rest for a bit. I use the opportunity to ask him how he found himself in this line of work.

It turns out he left home to work in commercial fishing in Peru. He was in a shipwreck there, though, so he had a little downtime before he got back here to Rurre. Boat he worked on went down. Sank with full traps on board, but he lived. Tore up his arm pretty good when it got stuck in some rigging, but nothing that didn’t heal up after a little rum and a week or two of rest. Still, the adventure of barely escaping a sinking boat—stacked full with a half ton of pissed off sea monsters—so he could return home and guide tourists deep into the Amazon to consume psychedelics—seems practically biblical in scale to me and my recently-updated LinkedIn profile.

He says he has a girlfriend.

Hell yes, he would have to have a girlfriend! Who wouldn’t, after that? You would walk into the first bar, order a stiff shot, and explain to the best-looking surfer girl there that you just escaped a sinking ship stuffed and stacked with savage, angry, clawing monsters. You would casually go on about how you were going to have a few drinks, rest up, and return to Bolivia to guide tourists deep into the rain forest now that you’ve cheated death. Hell yes, you would leave that bar with a girlfriend! As a matter of fact, there would probably be two of them. And they would be there with their sexually advanced, open-minded best friend; the three of them hanging on your every word about how you weren’t afraid to be on a sinking ship out there at sea that day.

We arrive at the campsite at 7pm, and the shaman is already there preparing the drink. For those who don’t know what ayahuasca is, how can I explain it? I suppose it depends if you yourself have taken drugz before, so that you would have a reference point. Buuut to not further incriminate myself, ayahuasca is a brew which has the psychoactive compound DMT. The whole point is to lose your mind through intense, drug-aided introspection. I first learned about ayahuasca from someone I met at a party. He explained how he would ship some home and drink it a few times a year to mentally refresh himself. Said it provided him enlightenment and direction. He smelled of bong water and frequently bragged about how he took a little too much acid in college, so I didn’t really take him seriously. Still, I was curious and asked him more about the drug. I had never done anything more extreme than a little pot.

He told me how ayahuasca was made: through a mixture of vines and roots, macerated and boiled with plants, resulting in a dark brown pungent liquid. When pressed about what exactly he had experienced, whether visually or physically, he would just say, “You just have to see for yourself, man.”

Thanks, asshole. Real enlightening.

These are the memories going through my head as the shaman prepares the brew. I’m actually here, this is really happening. Once the ayahuasca cools, he transports the concoction into a large plastic bottle before shaking vigorously to dissolve the sediments that have collected. He instructs us to fight past the consistency and smell of the brew before offering me the first serving. I am told to “consume as much as possible in my first attempt.” He doesn’t know that I’ve spent the last five years chugging Natty Lights in dingy apartments, so he’s impressed when I finish it in one gulp. Even the guide gives me a “Good shit” nod.

We consume the ayahuasca at approximately 8pm. The effects of the brew take about 45 minutes to kick in, so we sit in a circle and chat. Our Shaman tells us about his upbringing in a very spiritual family. His aunts practiced brujeria. His father taught him of ayahuasca’s healing powers, hoping that his son would carry on the tradition. “No one can understand our culture,” he says, “without first drinking ayahuasca.” Christ, does everyone from these parts have some epic coming-of-age story to their name? Apparently so.

“So where are you from?” asks the Shaman.

“Chicago,” I say, hoping it makes us seem tough.

“Ahh, ok. What brings you out here?”

I am thinking of a way to make the answer seem as romantic, fierce, and road-weary as it seems his and our guide’s lives have been. Maybe I’ll say something along the lines of, “Well, we’ve been clawing our way through Chicago for the last six or seven years, in the trenches…rats…cockroaches…had to get out of the greed race, just head to the airport and figure it out. Ended up coming down here—gotta think about our next plan, since I will probably get fired from my job for taking 3 unexpected weeks of vacation and I’m not too into the idea of going back to living within some bullshit corporate structure.”

But what comes out is, “We live in Chicago and came to Cochabamba for our friend’s wedding. We walked past the sign you had on the road and thought we’d take a day and give this a try.”

Nice.

The Shaman looks at his watch, and instructs us all to find our own comfortable spot within the campsite. He expects the ayahuasca to kick in shortly.

“Make sure you sit or lay down; do not stand up or try to walk around. Not that you’ll be able to, anyway.” I’ll understand what he means shortly.

I go with the hammock, and lay there looking up at the stars. Hoodie? Check. Bottle of water? Check. Aaaand awayyy we gooo! Right? I don’t know, I don’t feel shit. I look over and my buddy is off in the distance tripping absolute-fucking-balls, moaning about God-knows-what, having the time of his life. I look at the Shaman. He nods and smiles, like everything is working just like it’s supposed to. Yeah right, asshole. What a fucking scam this is. I can’t believe I paid for this shit. Ass ass ass ass ass ass ass ass. Japanese. Balled-up clouds! Whatever. Nothing is going to happen and I’m feeling super bummed and there is more love and beauty in this world than we could ever imagine. I was at Home Depot once. I must have been, like, I don’t know, nine or ten, and I found this wad of cash. It was over three-hundred dollars worth of twenties. Obviously that’s not a lot of money, but at age nine? Ten even? I mean, Christ, I was rich! Never mind that I walked that cash right to customer service and turned it in. But at the time, that was more money than I could have ever imagined to be in a single place. It seriously felt like if someone had told you that they found a bajillion gazillion dollars. Fucking stupid amount of money. Anyways, isn’t that how it must be with love and beauty, too? Seriously, don’t you think so? You know, like, there’s so much love and beauty in this world that we’re all bound to find an abundance of it sooner or later. And not just an abundance, but an amount so much greater than we thought we ever deserved.

Holy shit. It’s kicking in. But seriously! Turning that money in felt great. I think that was the last time my mom was proud of me. I wonder if I’m a good son. There is so much shit that I have messed up and ruined, so many mistakes and burned bridges. What is wrong with me? I need to get my shit together. I miss my dad. I wonder if I’ll ever be a dad. I’m so scared of marriage, of all of that. It freaks me out. Will I be a good husband? I start to wonder if I’ve ever screwed anything up in my life because of fear.

The winds pick up and I can hear rustling bushes and swaying trees in the distance. This only adds to the experience. The leaves above me begin to bleed into the clouds. I reach out to the guide and Shaman for guidance. Their faces are contorted. My hands are melting. Fifth gear shit.

I close my eyes only to see the entire Frankenstein-like patchwork of memories that is my life, all together, all at once. My favorite memory used to be when my Dad took me to see Lion King at Navy Pier. I remember watching him sporadically pour something into his soda cup. I had no idea what a flask was when I was 5, but do now. Thirty years later, that single moment set the tone for everything that followed: beautiful moments layered with heartbreaking ones, all together, all at once.

I try to sit up in the hammock, but my body doesn’t respond to my brain’s request. I begin to fidget out of panic, trying to ask for help, but my mouth cannot form words properly. The shaman approaches, rests his hand on my chest, and tells me that I am fine. I can feel tears rushing down my face, being blown every which way from the high winds. All I want to do is call my mom and apologize for every shitty thing I ever put her through.

I start to worry about my friends and manage to shift my head 45 degrees to see that one of them is being held up by the guide and Shaman so that he does not shit himself. He’s literally shitting uncontrollably, like, ten feet away from me. I decide not to ask questions, close my eyes, and ride this thing out. The stars are dancing above us.

Hours later, the effects are finally winding down. I am exhausted. Drained. I say that I want to go to sleep and our guide carries me to my tent. It takes everything I have to put one foot in front of the other. Packed into our tents like sardines, we spend the next half hour giggling until we fall asleep one by one.

The next morning, we hike back to our motorbikes, ride them to the ferry, and take the ferry back to Rurre. I part ways with my friends to head to an internet cafe to send my mom a Facebook message. She is fucking pissed because I have been unreachable for a week or so. I assure her I’ll be home by the end of the month.

My friends meet me at the cafe, but we collectively decide against checking our emails or booking return flights. Instead, we order some coffee and walk the streets. Something happened to us in that jungle. The ravenous pack of twenty-somethings constantly asking themselves, “What’s next?” is no longer here. As a group, we’ve slowed. All that love and beauty we knew was out there, somewhere, has been found. There is no more “next.” There is only “now.”

We run into our guide, who invites us to have dinner at his favorite restaurant. It closes soon, so we pick up the pace a bit.

The Bolivian sun is going down and so we keep on. Guides, friends, all of us.